Do you have information on surgeries at Miami hospitals? We want to hear from you
A University of Miami hospital surgeon is among three doctors named as defendants in the Baylor College of Medicine’s recent $15 million settlement with the Justice Department.
The surgeons, along with Baylor’s medical school and its St. Luke’s teaching hospital, were accused of illegally billing Medicare by claiming they performed multiple heart procedures simultaneously while unqualified residents helped them juggle the operations.
The three Baylor surgeons accused of wrongdoing at its teaching hospital included Dr. Joseph Coselli, 71, of Houston; Dr. David A. Ott, 77, of Houston; and Dr. Joseph Lamelas, 63, of Miami, according to court documents filed in Texas federal court. Since 2019, Lamelas has overseen the University of Miami Health System’s cardiac surgery program and is widely recognized as a pioneer of minimally invasive cardiac surgery.
The practice of simultaneous, overlapping or concurrent surgeries involves a surgeon scheduling and conducting operations on two or more patients in adjacent operating rooms at the same time. Often times, they’ll have other surgical staff or unqualified medical residents performing parts of the procedures without the surgeon present, according to Justice Department lawyers.
The practice, in the Baylor case, was illegal because the surgeons were signing off on the surgeries and billing Medicare for performing multiple surgeries at the same time.
The Miami Herald wants to know how prevalent this practice is, but we need your help.
If you work for a hospital in South Florida and know about concurrent surgeries, we want to hear from you. If you were a patient of the surgeons — Lamelas, Coselli and Ott — or other doctors performing concurrent surgeries and want to talk about your experience, we would also like to hear from you.
Please fill out the form below, and a reporter will be in touch. Anything you write on the form will be kept confidential and not be distributed unless a reporter has gotten in touch with you about it.
